The Tarp in a Garage Out Past Pegram

Sunday I was out before six, because August in Tennessee gives you about three good hours and then it starts leaning on you. Ran the Heritage west on 70 with the fog still lying in the low spots, the river bottoms doing that thing where the whole world is white up to your knees and clear above it.

Out past Pegram somebody had wired a cardboard sign to a fence post. ESTATE SALE, hand lettered, arrow pointing up a gravel drive. It was a quarter past seven and no sale starts at a quarter past seven, but the garage door was up and a light was on, so I turned in.

A woman in her seventies was sorting her husband's tools onto folding tables, price stickers on a few of them and not on most. He had been gone four months. She said it plain, the way people do once they have had to say it enough times. Wrenches in coffee cans, a bench grinder, three tackle boxes, and against the back wall something under a blue tarp with two tires showing at the bottom.

I asked. She pulled the tarp back herself. A 1974 Honda CB550, gold paint under about ten years of dust, dent in the left side of the tank, seat down to bare foam, chain you could have hung a swing from. He bought it to fix and never got to it. She told me two people had already called about it and both of them asked what her lowest was before they asked anything else.

I did not buy it. My garage holds exactly what is already in it, and a project I would not finish is just somebody else's regret moved down the road. But I stood there a good half hour hearing about a man I never met and a bike he never got around to, and I bought an eight dollar torque wrench I did not need. Rode home with it in the saddlebag. Fog burned off somewhere around Bellevue.